The transition to wind production in Aberdeen is already well underway, although most of the projects won’t come online until 2030 or later.
Photographer: Emily Macinnes/Bloomberg
Net Zero Will Make or Break One of the UK’s Wealthiest Cities
Aberdeen in northeast Scotland is trying to make the leap from an oil town to a renewables hub amid growing demand for cheap home-grown energy.
Shell Plc Engineer Denise Neill knows as well as anyone in Aberdeen, the UK’s oil capital, that the fortunes of a city that gets its income from one source can change quickly. The daughter of a farmer, she witnessed in the 1970s how the discovery of North Sea oil transformed the lives of local people, including her father who switched to selling rock from a quarry on his land for the expansion of the city’s airport.
“You had a lot of people suddenly going into businesses they’d never worked in before and within a very short space of time,” Neill, 55, said from Shell’s Scottish headquarters in the city.